Defending Leptis Magna

Charming story from Libya:

Ali Hribish stands by the Arch of Septimius Severus which dominates Libya’s ancient city of Leptis Magna, brandishing letters of thanks for his efforts to protect the site.

The former electricity company employee who is in his 50s has become the Roman city’s unlikely saviour, protecting it from looting and vandalism amid the chaos that has rocked the country since the 2011 downfall of former leader Muammar Qaddafi.

Despite having no background in archaeology, Mr Hribish gathered a band of fighters who dedicated themselves to preserving the ancient Roman city, a Unesco World Heritage site.

While others set up armed groups to protect banks and public buildings, "we immediately thought of Leptis Magna," says Ashraf Mohammed, 33, one of the first fighters to join Mr Hribish’s group.

"A bank can be rebuilt, but our monuments and our history are things we can’t replace."

This is the sort of thing I like to imagine I might do in such circumstances.

The Islamic State Loses its Libyan Stronghold

Pro-government Libyan militias have taken the city of Surt from the Islamic State, after a battle that began in early June. This pretty much eliminates IS-held territory in Libya. The IS had hoped to make Surt into "Raqqa on the Mediterranean," and at one point they controlled the coastline for 150 miles around the city. Now they have no territory left in Africa. The main anti-IS fighting force was the militia from Misurata, which for some reason has been the most effective fighting force in Libya since the civil war began. US and British special forces supported the offensive from the beginning, and it final stage was assisted by a handful of US bombing attacks on heavily fortified buildings in the city center.

Two teenage boys interviewed by the Times said life in the city had been awful:

“Life was hell,” said Hammad, a lanky 16-year-old with a shock of unkempt hair, describing the Islamic State’s brutal 18-month rule. Cafes were closed, schools renamed and girls flogged for not covering their faces, he said. He watched in horror as a hooded figure chopped off the hand of a thief — a desperate man who had stolen medicine. Nightmares came after the Islamists crucified people accused of crimes at a major traffic junction, then left their bodies to rot.

“I would wake in a panic, thinking I was suffocating,” he said. His brother Mohammed, 19, nodded in agreement. The Islamists had executed his friend Abdullah by pushing him from a tall building, accusing him of blasphemy. Abdullah was 15 years old, Mohammed said.

I think this counts as a victory for civilization. Libya remains a catastrophic mess, its "unity government" blessed with no unity and not much to govern, but at least it won't become a caliphate of slavery and torture.

Can We Bomb Our Way to Peace in Libya?

The news from Libya:

Two U.S. F-15 fighter jets carried out an airstrike in northwestern Libya early Friday that destroyed what the Pentagon described as a Islamic State training camp for several dozen foreign fighters and a senior terrorist operative, U.S. officials said.

“We obliterated the camp,” said a U.S. official who discussed the raid on condition of anonymity. “We're still assessing the casualties at this point, but we hit what we were aiming at.”

“We feel confident that this was a successful strike,” Peter Cook, the Pentagon spokesman, told reporters. “These particular fighters posed a threat to interests in the region, to Libya, and to the United States overall.” . . .

U.S. drones and spy satellites had spent weeks focusing on the walled compound outside the coastal town of Sabratha, about 50 miles west of Tripoli, another official said. The aerial images, coupled with other intelligence, heightened U.S. concern that the militants were preparing to launch a cross-border attack.

The Sabratha Municipal Council, the local government, said on its website that at least 41 people were killed in the bombing, many apparently as they slept. The compound was rented by non-Libyans, including Tunisians, and machine guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers were found in the rubble, the website said.

So, a “success.” And if I were in Obama's position I might have authorized this attack as well; who could stand back while the Islamic State prepared a major attack into Tunisia or some other country?

But I have to ask: what is the strategy here? Where is the legitimate government of Libya that we are intervening to support, and what is our plan for helping them? Who will be helped if our attacks “degrade” the power of the Islamic State? I don't have any better ideas, but I really think that the odd bombing raid is unlikely to stabilize the situation.

Libya: the Aftermath of Regime Change

Here's a great summary of how bad things have gotten in Libya:

There is no overstating the chaos of post-Qaddafi Libya. Two competing governments claim legitimacy. Armed militias roam the streets. The electricity is frequently out of service, and most business is at a standstill; revenues from oil, the country's greatest asset, have dwindled by more than ninety per cent. Some three thousand people have been killed by fighting in the past year, and nearly a third of the country's population has fled across the border to Tunisia. What has followed the downfall of a tyrant-a downfall encouraged by NATO air strikes-is the tyranny of a dangerous and pervasive instability.

And that was written before the local Islamic State branch started beheading Coptic Christians.

I opposed the US and European air offensive that toppled Qaddafi, because I thought it would lead to a dragging civil war like the one in Syria, and I thought a quick massacre by Qaddafi's forces was less awful than that. But then when the dictator was driven from power so quickly, I thought maybe I had been wrong. But now it seems that Libya is having its lengthy civil war, just without Qaddafi to lead one of the factions, and my thoughts have circled back to something I said in March, 2011:

I still don't see how this can have a decent outcome.

Wiliam Polk Summarizes the Results of U.S. Policy in the Middle East

Via James Fallows, veteran diplomat William Polk offers this assessment of U.S. Policy in the Middle East:

Starting in the west and moving east: in Libya, having destroyed the Qaddafi regime, we unleashed forces that have virtually torn Libya apart and have spilled over into Central Africa, opening a new area of instability. In Egypt, the "non-coup-coup" of General Sisi has produced no ideas on what to do to help the Egyptian people except to execute large numbers of their religious leaders; he has also made clear his suspicion of and opposition to us. In occupied Palestine, the Israeli state is reducing the population to misery and driving it to rage while, in Washington, its extreme right-wing government is thumbing its nose at its benefactor, America. Our relations have never been worse. In Syria, we are engaged in arming, training and funding essentially the same people whom the new Egyptian regime is about to hang and whom we are considering bombing in Iraq. In Iraq, we are about to become engaged in supporting the regime we installed and which is the close ally of the Syrian and Iranian regimes that we have been trying for years to destroy; yet in Iran, we appear to be on the point of reversing our policy of destroying its government and seeking its help to defeat the insurgents in Iraq. And on and on.

Polk has no helpful suggestions for extricating us from this mess, but his long-term policy recommendation seems clear: no more wars.

Kaff Jinoon

Kira Salak explores the Libyan Desert:

We rendezvous with the Tuareg man who is supposed to guide us for the next few days. But after Magdy explains our plans, he says, “To hell with you,” and walks off. This becomes the usual reaction whenever we approach any Tuareg about guiding us, and all because I want to visit to the “Devil’s Hill.” Kaff Jinoon. It’s a curious series of eroded sandstone peaks jutting from the dunes north of Ghat. Unique not only for its two obelisk-like spires, or horns, it’s also believed to be Grand Central Station for genies—spirits—from thousands of miles around. And not just any spirits, but those most wicked and base. The spirits of torturers and murderers. The spirits of those wrongly slain. Lost and sickened souls, attracted to the vortex that is Kaff Jinoon.

Clapperton and his companion Dr. Walter Oudney camped near the mountain, to the terror and vexation of their Tuareg guides who believed that small, red-bearded devils lived on it and caused mischief to all who passed, while spirits taking on the appearance old men materialized out of the night to terrify lone travelers. It was considered akin to suicide to go anywhere near the dreaded mountain. Wrote Clapperton, “[My guide] Hatita said he would not go up it for all the dollars in the world.” And it’s the same story now in Ghat, no Tuareg willing to travel with us to the mountain, no matter how much we’ll pay. They all have their own stories. There were the French tourists a few years back. They drove out to the mountain, thinking it’d be a good joke to climb it, but as soon as they got out of their car they were attacked by swarms of wasps. Libyan authorities found the group wandering along the road, unable to get in their vehicle, their faces covered with stings. And this, I’m told, was minor. Much worse has occurred. Like the Libyan soldier at a checkpoint near the mountain who saw something so awful, so terrifying, that he went into shock and couldn’t walk for a year. To this day, he is unable to speak of what he saw. And then there is the man who swore by Allah that he saw an entire army division march around the base of the mountain one night—a ghost army, that disappeared before his very eyes.

Jinoon and its vicinity has been considered a stomping ground for evil genies for centuries. Intrepid Arab traveler Ibn Battuta first wrote about this desert in the 14th century, describing it as a place “haunted by demons; if the [traveler] be alone, they make sport of him and disorder his mind, so that he loses his way and perishes.” Western explorers journeying in the Fezzan regarded such tales with derision, determined to see the mountain and to try to climb it. In 1822, Dr. Oudney made the first recorded attempt, reaching the mountain’s 4,500-foot-high saddle and returning without incident. “The Doctor has got a high reputation for courage for his visit to Jinoon,” Clapperton wrote about his friend’s successful climb, “and every newcomer is sure to ask him about it.” Later explorers were less successful. British adventurer John Richardson attempted the climb in 1853, getting lost on the descent and wandering in the desert, near-death, for two days. Robust German explorer Heinrich Barth had an almost identical experience in 1857. I am determined to see the place. I want to climb the mountain. We decide to go there unguided. . . .

And in Libya

Anti-militia protesters stormed the Benghazi headquarters of Ansar al-Sharia, the radical groups suspected of killing US diplomats, and burned it to the ground. About 30,000 people participated in the anti-militia march.

Which I think is the best news in months.

Former Libyan Rebels Shooting at Each Other

Today's not so good news from Tripoli:

Two former Libyan rebel factions clashed Tuesday in hours of gunbattles in central Tripoli that left five fighters dead, a Tripoli military council official said.

Former rebels of Tripoli and a separate group of fighters from the city of Misrata fought with machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and anti-aircraft guns. Col. Walid Shouaib, a member of Tripoli Military Council, said the clashes were triggered by arrest of a Misrata fighter on New Year's Eve by Tripoli fighters. He was suspected of robbery and the Misrata fighters were trying to free him. . . .

Disparate groups of former revolutionary fighters have clashed repeatedly since the end of the eight-month civil war that toppled Moammar Gadhafi's regime in October. Disbandment of these armed groups, which are divided by the regions where the operate, has posed a challenge to Libyan authorities. 

This doesn't seem like a terrible problem yet, but it is a reminder that whenever you unleash hordes of young men with guns, trouble results, and it points toward the far worse things that might happen if political progress stalls.

Gaddafi is Dead

And killed rather gleefully, it seems. Well, that chapter of Libya's history is over. I wish them all the best, and fear that they will find democracy less wonderful than they imagined.

Libyan Rebels Control Sirte

According to numerous witnesses, Libyan rebels now control Gaddafi's home town of Sirte, the last major settlement in the hands of loyalists:

Libyan fighters on Thursday overran the remaining positions of Moammar Gadhafi loyalists in his hometown of Sirte, ending the last major resistance by former regime supporters still holding out two months after the fall of the capital Tripoli.

Reporters at the scene watched as the final assault began around 8 a.m. and ended about 90 minutes later. Just before the assault, about five carloads of loyalists tried to flee the enclave down the coastal highway but were met by gunfire from the revolutionaries, who killed at least 20 of them.

“Our forces control the last neighborhood in Sirte,” Hassan Draoua, a member of Libya’s interim National Transitional Council, told The Associated Press in Tripoli after Sirte’s fall. “The city has been liberated.”

Now comes the hard part.

Obama and Libya

Michael Hastings has an interesting piece in Rolling Stone about the Obama Administration's decision to intervene in Libya. Nothing really new in it, but it does given what looks like a nice summary of the process. The first interesting thing about the intervention is that the three insiders most involved in pushing for it were women. The first proponents were Susan Rice and Samantha Powers, both "liberal interventionists" determined not to allow a genocide on their watch, and they were soon joined by Hillary Clinton.

Another interesting point is that Obama, determined to avoid what everyone has criticized about the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld Iraq operation, set up a working group to debate options and outcomes in Libya as soon as the revolution began. Contributions to this discussion were sought widely, including from administration opponents like Elliott Abrams. The upshot seems to have been that the downside to intervention was not really all that scary: many people had vague fears about intervening in yet another Muslim country, but there were no realistic scenarios that posed a big threat to the US. Among the opponents was Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and most of the Pentagon brass, but in the final meeting Obama overruled their opposition:

According to one participant's summary, Obama said: Look, the question of who rules Libya is probably not a vital interest to the United States. The atrocities threatened don't compare to atrocities in other parts of the world, I hear that. But there's a big "but" here. First of all, acting would be the right thing to do, because we have an opportunity to prevent a massacre, and we've been asked to do it by the people of Libya, their Arab neighbors and the United Nations. And second, the president said, failing to intervene would be a "psychological pendulum, in terms of the Arab Spring, in favor of repression." He concluded: "Just signing on to a no-fly zone so that we have political cover isn't going to cut it. That's not how America leads." Nor, he added, is it the "image of America I believe in."

As I read this, the decisive factor seems to have been a desire to somehow support the Arab Spring. The movement for freedom in the Arab world has stalled in Egypt, and we could not figure out how to support it in Bahrain because we are essentially on the side of the Arab sheiks in their ongoing power struggle with Iran. In Libya we could support freedom at little cost ($1 billion so far, and no American lives lost), with the support of our key allies, and without much risk of a terrible outcome. So Obama decided to do it. As Bill Clinton put it when defending his intervention in Kosovo, "We can't do everything, but we should do what we can."

Still Looks Pretty Good in Libya

Dan Serwer:

In a trip to Libya this month, just weeks after Muammar Qaddafi’s fall, I found peace coming fast to Tripoli, despite continued resistance in several Libyan towns. Ten days ago, families with children mobbed Martyrs’ square, where Qaddafi once held forth, to commemorate the hanging 80 years ago of Libya’s hero of resistance against the Italians, Omar Mukhtar. Elementary schools opened last week. The university will open next month. Water and electricity are flowing. Uniformed police are on the street. Trash collection is haphazard but functioning.

Why this rapid recovery in a country marked by four decades of dictatorship? Why does Libya seem on track while Egypt seems to have gone off the rails?

Libya has at least three important advantages: good leadership and clear goals at the national and local levels, careful planning and adequate resources.

I was interested in this statement about the importance of senior revolutionary leader Mustafa Abdel Jalil:

Libyans believe Mustafa Abdel Jalil, who leads the National Transitional Council (NTC), is uncorrupted and uninterested in continuing in power. He has pledged not to seek future office. He has visited the liberated cities to celebrate the single goal of freeing Libya from the Qaddafi regime. . . .

I think the personal decisions made by revolutionary actors have a huge impact on what happens afterward, and that this is the main thing making such situations unpredictable. The best scenario for Libya is that Jalil in fact steps aside and is much praised for this, setting a precedent that other Libyan leaders will follow. But if he tries to hold on to power, or if some other leader tries to grab it, things could get ugly very quickly. The modesty of George Washington's ambition was one of the crucial things in American history.

Volunteerism and War

As Libya's former rebels get ready to attack the few remaining towns still controlled by Gaddafi loyalists, they continue to be joined by fresh volunteers. At Bani Walid:

Volunteers asking to join the battle said Saturday they were getting increasingly impatient with the standoff. Dozens crowded around a desk at a mosque in Wishtata, a hamlet about 25 miles from Bani Walid, to register their names, blood type and other information.

Abdel Wahab Milad, a 26-year-old teacher from the town of Gharyan, drove dozens of miles to the front in a pickup truck with six friends. Dressed in army fatigues, he said he signed up for battle because it was time to “get rid of Gadhafi once and for all.”

The battles of Libya's war have been nothing like the slaughters of, say, the Iran-Iraq War, but hundreds of people have died in them. The risk of death does not seem to be deterring anyone from fighting. The rebels have more willing soldiers than they can arm or lead into battle, as they have through most of the war. By this point most of them men on Gaddafi's side can be said to be volunteers as well, since all but the most prominent commanders or the torturers could surrender themselves without much risk of punishment, or any real shame. They are fighting because they want to.

War seems terrible and frightening to most Americans, safe in our suburban edens. But many men (and a few women) don't see it that way. So long as the chance of death is not too high, and the odds against some kind of success are not too long, many men love to fight. Compared to the years of stifling frustration so many Libyans have endured, war can even seem like a release. To the Libyan rebels, fighting in a war that they hope will make their lives much better, and that will probably be remembered as a glorious victory for the whole people, is worth taking terrible risks.

The Tripoli Offensive

Nicolas Pelham has a piece in the New York Review explaining how the Libyan rebels planned and organized their offensive on the capital:

Hatched in capitals across Europe and the Arab world, as well as in rebel operation rooms secretly organized in Libya itself, the military campaign took four months of planning. In May, exiled opposition leaders abandoned their jobs as lecturers in American colleges and established an intelligence-gathering bureau on Djerba, the Tunisian island across the border from Libya. Led by Abdel Majid Biuk, an urbane mathematics teacher from Tampa, Florida, the team interviewed four hundred Qaddafi security officers who defected following the loyalist defeat in Misrata; using Google Earth, they analyzed the colonel’s defenses. “We went through the whole city building by building to ascertain its fortifications,” Biuk told me on his arrival in Tripoli.

He passed the data on to a military operations room elsewhere on Djerba whose staff included representatives of NATO and Gulf allies as well as Libyan army veterans who had defected to the US and formed the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL), an opposition group that led a series of aborted coups in the 1980s and 1990s, before branching into website campaigns. Under the eyes of Tunisian customs officials, they smuggled satellite phones, which are banned in Tunisia, in ambulances across the border into Libya, and set about supplying the rebels. . . .

Tunisia provided a conduit for fighters as well as arms. With Qaddafi’s continued control of the center of the country blocking access over land, Benghazi volunteers took a circuitous route, flying from Egypt to Tunis, before crossing the border at the Tunisian town of Dehiba into the Nafusa Mountains. By mid-August they had established five brigades each with its own mountain training base, and together formed a two-thousand-man battalion under Hisham Buhajiar’s command as well as that of Abdel Karim Bel Haj, a Libyan veteran of the Afghan jihad. Trainers included NFSL veterans. As they prepared the final stages of their assault, a host of Berber irregulars drawn from towns across the mountains jumped on board. Meanwhile, a collection of local traders, engineers, students, and the jobless from Misrata, battle-hardened by their seventy-day defense of their city, reassembled their brigades and prepared to join the attack on Tripoli from the east, by both road and sea.

Finally, the planners on Djerba divided Tripoli into thirty-seven sectors, and appointed local security coordinators to recruit, train, and arm local cells, using Muslim Brotherhood leaders to bless an armed uprising. . . .

On Saturday, August 20, as dusk descended and the mosques sounded the prayer call for breakfast, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, Qaddafi’s meek-seeming former justice minister who now heads the NTC, went on television to deliver an address. Before he had finished, the rebel flag was flying over Suq al-Juma and other Tripoli neighborhoods. Meanwhile, NATO forces intensified their bombardment of loyalist positions on the western outskirts of Tripoli, stretching to its limits their UN mandate to protect civilians. As the colonel’s forces abandoned their bases, they found themselves sandwiched between rebels sweeping in from the mountains and Tripolitans carving out their own enclaves. Challenged on multiple fronts, Qaddafi’s forces melted away.

Pelham notes that unlike the Americans, who had no plan at all for how to govern Baghdad once they took it, the Libyan rebels had a 70-page Tripoli Plan laying out how they would go about restoring order to the capital. He cautions, though, that "As in Iraq, the aftermath already looks like a more arduous task than the rapid military campaign."

Gaddafi in Revolt

It strikes me that Muammar Gaddafi may find it much more congenial to be a guerrilla commander than he ever did to be dictator. Wasn't he just born to hide in the hills and issue violent communiques?

Gaddafi asked his supporters to continue what he called "struggle against foreign aggression" and said those against him were divided. . . . "Let there be a long fight and let Libya be engulfed in flames." He said the "balance of power is now levelled as all tribes are now armed".

Listening to his speeches, he seems to have thought that he was fighting a partisan war against the capitalist world for his whole career, and now he really is. I wonder how good he will be at it.

Hillary Clinton on Libya

From the Secretary's remarks, yesterday:

Well, this is my ninth trip to discuss the current crisis in Libya, and each time I have urged that our partners stay focused on the ultimate objective of helping the Libyan people chart their way to a better future. And today, that future is within their reach. All of us are inspired by what is happening in Libya.

Six months ago, Libyans stood up to demand fundamental rights and freedom. And when Qadhafi met their peaceful protest with violence, the Libyan people refused to back down. While their struggle is not over, the Libyan people are taking back their country. Libya’s transformation is largely the result of their own courage and their resilience in the face of very difficult days. The sacrifice that the Libyan people have been willing to make in order to obtain freedom and dignity has been extraordinary.

But the United States and our international partners are also proud of our own contributions. . . .

Today, the international community must maintain the same sense of resolve and shared responsibility. We know from experience that winning a war is no guarantee of winning the peace that follows. That is why even as we sought to protect civilians and pressured Qadhafi to step down, we have supported the Libyans as they laid the groundwork for a transition to democracy that is just, inclusive, and sustainable.

Looks Like I was Wrong about Libya

It remains to be seen what sort of government will emerge from the Libyan revolution, but as the rebels consolidate their hold on the country and begin moving their government to Tripoli, I think it is time to reassess my position. So far the rebels have committed no more in the way of atrocities and revenge killings than happen inevitably in every war, so I would say that their conduct has been good, and the odds for some kind of reasonable settlement seem better than 50-50.

I opposed NATO intervention in the war because I thought the main effect would be to drag the fighting out for years, with the combatants on both sides becoming increasingly bloody-minded and the rebels forming factions that would be as likely to fight each other as Gaddafi, leading in the end to far more death and destruction than Gaddafi would have visited on his opponents had we let him win, all in pursuit of a goal (Libyan democracy) that is by no means guaranteed even now and looked much less likely in March.

Things have gone differently than I supposed.

The rebels' surprising (to me, anyway) success has had two parts, political and military. Much of the anti-war commentary from "realists" argued that because Libyans identify mainly as members of tribes, they could never work together well or form a united government without a dictator to lead them. This seems to have been greatly exaggerated, and even if it was true before the war, nothing changes people's identities like working together in a successful rebellion. So far the rebel government has achieved legitimacy in the eyes of many Libyans and in the eyes of the international diplomatic community, including hard-eyed cynics from authoritarian Arab governments. They have managed to keep normal life going on pretty well in the eastern areas they have controlled. They already have much to be proud of, even if the hardest work is ahead of them.

I find the military success of the rebels even more surprising. Amateur soldiers can sometimes fight well on the defensive, but they find it very hard to mount attacks. Thus we have had many wars in modern times, like the one in Bosnia, in which the combatants sit on opposite hills and launch rockets at each other for years, without anything much changing. Somehow the Libyan rebels, after six months of mostly low-level combat, managed to raise their game to a very different level. Instead of grinding slowly toward Tripoli, fighting in twenty places at once, they put together a bold plan that could have come from the Pentagon to bypass most of Gaddafi's forces and attack his "center of gravity" in Tripoli. Thanks to their bravery and the steadily declining morale of Gaddifi's men, it worked, and a war that looked set to last another year at least is now for all practical purposes nearly over. The way this operation was coordinated, with rebels in the capital timing their uprising to meet offensives coming from both the east and the southwest, bodes well for the ability of Libyans to work together after the war is over.

Things could still go badly in Libya, but for now they look very good. I was wrong, and the men who led NATO intervention -- especially Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron -- were right. They saw an opportunity to rid the world of a noxious dictator at a reasonable cost and to put the West on the side of freedom in the Arab world, and they took it. Their gamble has paid off. I am still bothered by the dishonesty of the war -- the way Britain and France have pretended to be "protecting civilians" as they bomb Gaddafi's army into oblivion, the way Obama refused to seek Congressional approval for the war because bombing people itsn't really "combat" -- but that just seems to be the way wars are fought these days.

Instead of disaster, or bloody stalemate, NATO intervention in Libya has led to freedom for another of the world's nations, to a great triumph for the Libyan people, and to a huge policy victory for the West. I was wrong to oppose it, and I am very happy about that.

We will celebrate in Bab al-Aziziya!

That would be Gaddafi's compound in Tripoli, and today Libya's rebels made good on that oft-repeated boast. An interesting detail:

The conquest was spearheaded by hundreds of experienced fighters from the port city of Misurata, who developed into some of the rebels’ best organized and most effective units after months of bitter fighting with elite loyalist forces.

This sets me wondering who will rise to the top of the post-Gaddafi government: the reluctant warriors who have been the public face of the rebellion, or hardened men from the front lines?

Of course this is a bit premature, since Gaddafi is still at large and has many followers, who are reported to still control two neighborhoods in the capital as well as several outlying towns. But at the moment he seems to have been decisively defeated, and the rebels are in charge.

Gaddafi's Compound Falls

Reuters:

Libyan opposition forces poured into Muammar Gaddafi's compound in Tripoli on Tuesday and were seen firing in the air in celebration, reporters on the scene said.

Rebel Victory in Libya?

Big doings in Libya, where Gaddafi's regime is teetering:

By late Sunday, rebel fighters had converged on the capital from four directions, and opposition flags were fluttering over buildings across the city. Thousands of people poured onto the streets in areas under rebel control to celebrate, stomping on posters of Gaddafi, setting off fireworks and honking horns, even in the symbolically significant Green Square in the heart of the city, previously the scene of near-daily pro-Gaddafi rallies.

With communications to the capital sporadic and some journalists confined to their hotel, reports of opposition gains within Tripoli could not be independently confirmed, and some experts cautioned that a tough urban battle may yet lie ahead between the lightly armed and untrained rebels and the elite government forces kept in reserve for the defense of the capital.

But reporters traveling with rebel forces said Gaddafi’s defenses were melting away faster than had been expected, with reports of entire units fleeing as rebels entered the capital from the south, east and west, and his supporters inside the city tearing off their uniforms, throwing down their weapons and attempting to blend into the population.

A Tripoli-based activist said the rebels had secured the seaport, where several hundred reinforcements for the opposition had arrived by boat, and were in the process of evicting Gaddafi loyalists from the Mitiga air base on the eastern edge of the city.

“The Gaddafi regime is clearly crumbling,” said a statement issued by NATO, whose five-month-old aerial bombing campaign, ostensibly launched to protect civilians, contributed enormously to the erosion of government defenses. A U.S. official in Washington who was monitoring the intelligence from Libya said that the situation in Tripoli was fluid but that Gaddafi and his hard-core loyalists did not appear likely to give up easily.

At the moment it appears that this may end without great massacres or years of stalemate, and that would be grand.